Winner at Chelsea is both witty and pretty

A garden celebrating the English country gardening tradition won the coveted Best Garden in Show award at the Chelsea Flower Show yesterday, the judges plumping for wit and expertise before audacity.

"Garden Open", designed by Roger Platts, recreates a typical example of the 3,500 gardens opened every year as part of the National Gardens Scheme.

The walled garden has a summerhouse, roses and clematis climbing pergolas and tea and cakes for £1.50.

But it is the contrast with a neglected area, a buttercup meadow, which forms its entrance, that creates a sense of dereliction and renewal over the years, and the battle with nature that gardening involves. Abandoned in this unkempt area is a lawn mower dating back 75 years when the Yellow Book garden scheme began.

Mr Platts, a former Chelsea gold medal winner who runs a nursery at Stick Hill, Edenbridge, Kent, featured classic English summer perennials such as blue hardy geraniums, astrantias, lavender, artemisia and euphorbias, dotted with foxgloves against a background of evergreen shrubs such as cistus, hebe, myrtle, box and yew.

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Mr Platts, who started gardening at 13 and trained as a nurseryman, unlike the majority of today's garden designers, said: "I can't believe it. It is beyond my wildest dreams that we would get Best Garden in Show. I'm thrilled that a traditional-style garden has won."

Gold medal winners who missed out on the main prize included the Chelsea first-timer Mary Reynolds, whose A Celtic Sanctuary was a study in Irish mythology in dry-stone and wild flowers; and Stephen Woodham, the designer of the cool, spacious exercise in modernist gardening, The Sanctuary.

The Prince of Wales's The Healing Garden, designed with Jinny Blom, won a silver medal. Bob Sweet, the show's organiser, said: "It was a very desirable, very high-quality garden. The judging panel looked at it the way they looked at all the gardens, on design, planting and construction.

"Overall, Roger Platts had all the elements - a very well thought-out design, a very appropriate choice of plants and the right plant associations, things that would actually grow together in a garden. The overall ambience is exceptional. It is a great celebration of the English gardening tradition."

The gold medal winner among the growing category of courtyard gardens was A Child's Eye View, by Aylesbury College, Bucks.

The garden was based on a poll of the designers' children. It has a den, a secret area behind a door, and bright plants, many of which you can eat.